This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.

particular on the services provided through
workplace ‘sick clubs’, the chapter examines the development of medicalresponses to sickness and injury in and around coalmining communities in late
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and shows how the coal industry
was innovative both in the extent of medical provision available to workers
56
DISABILITY IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
and in a variety of responses to workplace injury from first aid to specialist
convalescent homes. The expansion of medical services made mineworkers,
like other industrial workers

disabled workers in a period that is significant for the gradual evolution of ‘disability’ as a category distinct from other
forms of disease or ill health.12 It examines the role of economic changes in
shaping understandings and experiences of disability during this crucial era of
industrial development. Different communal, welfare and medicalresponses
to disablement are analysed alongside evidence that indicates the agency of
people with impairments. Indeed, rather than seeing ‘disabled’ mineworkers
simply as the victims of exploitative economic expansion, a key

opening scene introduces the viewers to the prototypical
imagery of the HIV/​AIDS epidemic, showing ‘emaciated gay men in hospital beds’ (Hallas, 2009: 12). An object of intense debate since the early
years of the epidemic, these deathbed images have been fiercely criticised
for sustaining ‘stigmatizing ideological narratives about homosexuality’s
“innate pathology” ’, instead of persuading ‘readers to demand a greater
political and medicalresponse to the AIDS crisis’ (Crimp, 2002; Hallas,
2009: 12; Treichler, 1988; Watney, 1987; 1996). Nevertheless, the opening
shot

The present volume, which examines the correlations that were being drawn between notions of progress and pathology across a diverse range of socio-economic cultures in the long nineteenth century beginning with the French Revolution, interrogates such notions of exceptionalism. Our purview is deliberately transnational, drawing on case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China, and the South Pacific, in order to provide rich comparative perspectives on medicalresponses to, and constructions of, modernity, while demonstrating that

The intellectual influence of non-medical research on policy and practice in the Colonial Medical Service in Tanganyika and Uganda

Shane Doyle

-preservation helped ensure that
the EAMS recommendations of the 1950s were acted upon. In Buganda,
medicalresponses to malnutrition during the colonial period were shaped
not just by the interests of a range of medical actors and funders,
including the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the Medical Research
Council, but also by the findings of a cohort of anthropologists and
psychologists, and by Buganda’s royal

the years before
the 1940s. Aneurin Bevan’s awareness of the conditions in coalmining communities and, indeed, his involvement in a working-class mutualist organisation,
the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society, were important influences in the
decisions he took in the period from 1945 to 1948. At the same time, and
despite such influences, occupational health, industrial medicine and the medicalresponses to disability continued to be partial, fragmentary and uncoordinated,
and medicine continued to fail disabled miners and to subject them to a medical
model that